Plato vs. Freud on Eros and Sexuality

Plato vs. Freud on eros and sexuality

Plato's concept of love mandates two rectifications. Both of these rectifications are necessary in order for us to appreciate the relevance of Plato's theory of love to contemporary problems. The first depiction comports with the non-sexual aspect of the loving relationship, because Plato's theory of love indeed includes sex.

The second depiction, or rectification, is related inextricably to the heterosexual aspect of the loving relationship. Without a doubt, Plato considers love between people solely as a homosexual phenomenon, but his explication of sex comprises both heterosexual and homosexual relationships.

The sociological setting of Platonism is all one needs to understand it: In Fifth Century Athens, apart from some outstanding exceptions, like Pericles' legendary love for Aspasia, men only married for reproductive needs and ends, yet reserved the term 'love' and the passionate activity of sexual love only for homosexual relationships. However, nothing in Plato's philosophy gets in the way of adapting it in its entirety to modern times, when due to their education and to political changes, women gained the right to love and to be loved as absolute equals to men, who have always enjoyed this very right.

After dispelling these misunderstandings related to the pop-culture notion of Platonic love, we discover a great richness and depth in Plato's comprehension and rationalization of love. In explaining why love is so incredibly critical to us and yet why it falls in our lives so often, Plato's comprehension of love is increasingly applicable to our time.

There is, of course, a very high rate of divorce that threatens our marriages. From the sexual passion we call love, we demand and indeed coerce a lot, but usually end up bitterly upset when the romance erodes. Nevertheless, we keep insisting on getting married, believing in our heart of hearts and against all logic and rationality, that we are simply going to be the ones who will succeed in beating the system. If we fail, we just switch our partner and try again. We often finish our love life as we began it: completely flabbergasted and often bitterly upset, but still hopeful.

Freud, on the other hand, views love only from the perspective of the sexual drive. From Freud's perspective, love as well as sexuality is rooted in our infancies. A person's first love object, oedipally, is the mother. The mother's breast, for Freud, provides the infant not only with nourishment but also a source of sexual pleasure which he will years afterwords demand from his adult lover. This is the opposite for girls.

The primary difference between Plato's concept of lover and Freud's concept is the understanding, for Freud, that sex is as much a part of love as anything else is. Plato refused to believe that, believing procreation to be different from sexual or passionate love, which, of course, was saved only for homosexual encounters.

The difference here lies in their different methods of inquiry. Plato based his philosophy on unscientific observations and readings of the past masters. Freud, on the other hand, performed actually psychiatric examinations on the way to determining his mode of thinking.

There is very little similar in both philosophers ideals, save perhaps the agreement among both that passionate love does indeed exist -- of course, they both define it utterly differently as described above.

Socrates' objections to Lysius' speech in the Phaedrus

Socrates objects strongly to Lysius' speech, read by Phaedrus. Phaedrus reads this Socrates a speech prepared by Lysius, at a critical time, and declares that the surrender of one's love life should not go with the one with whom they are in love. Rather, Lysius believes that the future gains of the non-lover outweigh those of the lover. He finishes with a very strong point, that "the business should involve no harm, but mutual advantage."

Here, Plato, through Socrates, naturally disagrees with his prop Lysius. After all, Plato never really put forth views on his own: He always spoke in shadows, setting up characters who mirrored his belief structure, and also characters who believed the opposite of what he believed.

Plato, though he did not believe in the same type of sexual love espoused by Freud, did however refuse to belittle the concept of love. Lysius is doing just that in this speech. Lysius dismisses love in its entirety, declaring that one should not truly invest one's life's happiness in the one with whom one is in love.

For Plato, even though homosexual love is the true passionate love, it is still a love, and still he believes that he is willing to trust his love with the happiness in his own life.

Lysius makes love too much of a business proposition, or perhaps a zero-sum game, where both sides do benefit, of course, but they lose in terms of passionate love. Plato does not believe this: To him, love and passionate love are more of a positive-sum game. True, he did not allow passionate love to interfere with the science of reproduction, but he still did believe that homosexual passionate love truly allows humans to interact in a passionate way with one another.